Opioids A question about codeine cold water extraction

[falconhoff]

Hello everyone,

I had a lot of co-codamol prescribed to me when I broke my arm but didn’t take that much of them because they were useless and they piled up, today I had a banging migraine so I decided to do a cold water extraction.
I used 30 pills of (Codeine 8mg, Acetaminophen 500mg, Caffeine 30mg) I know caffeine is bad in CWE but I’ve used a lot of caffeine in the past, so I figured it’s ok.
Anyway, just to be sure things are right, I weighed everything at every step to keep track of the Acetaminophen. But the final weights didn’t make since and I thought I’d better ask here.


The 30 pills weighed 24 grams (Which means 15 grams Acetaminophen, 240mg Codeine, 900mg Caffeine and 7.86 grams pill binders and fillers).
I used water a little bit under 140ml and I weighed it which read 131.7g
The water and the pills weighed 131.7+24=155.7g
A wet filter alone weighted ~2g
The sludge left over in the final filter (after filtration) weighed 39.1g
So it should be (155.7)-(39.1)-(2)=114.6g
But the final solution weighted 101.3 grams, which means a difference of 13.3grams.


TL;DR:
I started with 155 grams of material and the sludge weighted 39g and ended up with 101 grams which means a deference of ~13 grams.

Sorry if my math is wrong, but that migraine rendered me stupid and I'm not very bright lol, my question is, is my math correct? If so, what could those 13 grams deference be?

 

[falconhoff]

The method I use is like this:

I put 140ml of very cold waterin a glass.
Crushed 30 pills and put them in the water for few minutes.
I filtered it once with coffee filter but it seemed a bit cloudy.
I put it in the freezer until it registered 2 degrees c.
Filtered it again with a new coffee filter. The final solutions is clear and tasted bitter.

 

[LucidSDreamr]

I’m to stoned to do math right now but you must consider that some of your final product will contain some acetaminophen and some of the pill binders.

This isn’t a super efficient or clean extraction like a liquid liquid acid base extraction would be

 

[3DQSAR]

Sci-Hub | Solubility of Paracetamol in Pure Solvents. Journal of Chemical & Engineering Data, 44(6), 1391–1395 | 10.1021/je990124v

The important thing to bear in mind is that it's not possible to cleanly extract paracetamol from paracetamol/codeine compound medications. The key concept is to ensure that the amount of paracetamol consumed is not toxic. As the link shows, paracetamol isn't very soluble in water and the solubility varies a great deal on temperature. In comparison, codeine phosphate is VERY soluble in water 0.577mg/mL at STC. It will alter depending on temperature but it's around an order of magnitude MORE soluble.

I do not endorse this methodology unless you understand the underlying chemistry. For example, the solubility of paracetamol is highly dependent on the pH of the water thus soluble paracetamol contains chemicals that alter that pH.

I would consider it an absolute last resort an even after careful extraction I would still take several capsules of methionine (an amino-acid that is sometimes added to paracetamol formulations to reduce liver damage).